Labour make massive gains in 3 local elections
Labour won a stunning by-election victory last night in Wednesbury North, in the Sandwell borough (near Birmingham)
The results were:
Labour: 1320
Conservative: 643
National Front: 76
Libdem: 45
Green: 42
It meant the Conservatives lost a council seat they’ve held for the last 36 years in the predominantly Labour borough.
The result marks a massive 16.5% swing from Conservative to Labour since May 2010. Two years ago they took 20% of vote. Last night they won 62% of the vote.
Councillor Bob Piper was very happy.
It was a good night for Labour elsewhere too. The party won both seats at the Croxteth by-election in Liverpool
The results were:
Labour: 1447 / 1424
Libdems: 611/479
SLP: 135/70
BNP: 117
Greens: 63
UKIP: 50 / 19
English Democrats: 35 / 33
Conservatives: 31 / 29 (yes, they came last!)
On Twitter Politic_Animal said:
Sniggers at Tory candidates coming 9th in Liverpool Croxteth by-election. To think Liverpool was once a Tory city.
Local elections in Baxenden were similarly positive for Labour, but they failed to win.
Paul Cotterill reported on Twitter that it was a 16% swing from Con to Lab, “safest Tory seat in Hyndburn”
Results:
Conservatives: 683
Labour: 434
UKIP 17
Independent 47
60k petition to stop Murdoch buying BSkyB
Over 60,000 people have written submissions to Ofcom, calling on the regulator to hold a full investigation into Newscorp’s planned buyout of BSkyB.
Campaigners will deliver dozens of boxes of signatures to Ofcom’s London offices today morning.
It is the final day of a public consultation on whether the Murdoch buy-out would harm media plurality and democracy.
The campaign was run by web-based lobby organisations 38 Degrees and Avaaz.org
David Babbs of 38 Degrees said
More control for Murdoch is bad news for Britain. 38 Degrees members want Ofcom to get the Competition Commission involved. We need a wide-ranging inquiry into Murdoch’s power and how this takeover could affect our democracy.
Ricken Patel of Avaaz, said
Britain loses if Rupert Murdoch wins this takeover battle. Giving one man control of half the British media would be a disaster. Citizens want Ofcom to do its duty and stand up for a healthy, diverse media.
Both ran petitions on their website encouraging people to make their voices heard.
From a press release
The real problem is Rupert Murdoch, not Andy Coulson
It was revealed last night that Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, was told by a high court judge to name and shame those who gave him the order.
This is riveting stuff indeed, if – like me – you’ve been itching to know the level of complicity in News International’s upper echelons.
But as Coulson performs the seductive dance of denial, and as we eagerly speculate over whether he’s lying, I feel we miss the biggest issue of all: the one element of the whole saga that is resolutely undeniable..
continue reading… »
IDS makes embarrassing ‘correction’ to claim
Yesterday Don Paskini highlighted that Iain Duncan Smith had recently misled the House of Commons over housing, by citing figures from property website rather than official numbers.
He had claimed that, according to the Office for National Statistics, private landlords had increased the cost of benefit.
But the figures did not stack up and were disputed by several who worked in the housing sector.
Today, Ian Fletcher, director of policy at the British Property Federation, said:
DWP press officers and Ministers should not cut fast and loose with dodgy stats. I think the public will draw their own conclusions when the Secretary of State has access to the best statisticians in the land via the Office for National Statistics, and best rental data via the Valuation Office, and yet would prefer to use findaproperty.com.
In an age of austerity it makes you wonder why taxpayers are paying for all these Government statisticians if the department would rather look up any old statistic off the web than use the professionals they have at their disposal.
Asked if IDS would make an apology to the House of Commons, a spokesperson from the DWP told PoliticsHome: “A correction has been made. That’s all I can say.”
The spokesperson added:
This is a distraction from the important point the Secretary of State was making that whilst rents in the private sector went down between November 2008 and February 2010, private sector rents for housing benefit claimants went up.
It’s not a distraction – IDS misled the House, and for that he should apologise.
How the government could build one million homes
contribution by Charles Seaford
Both sides in the recent debate about housing benefit and cuts to the social housing programme assume that the trade off is between how fast we can reduce the deficit and how many people can have decent homes.
But there is a third player in this game, along with the tax payer and the tenant: the land owner. Or the land speculator if you like.
And as things stand he or she is the only one who always wins.
continue reading… »
Kennedy to vote against Coalition on tuition fees
Well done to Charles Kennedy for retaining some principles.
In a letter to Libdem activist Sophie Bertrand, Charles Kennedy said he would vote against the rise in tuition fees.
There are long-established reasons as to why I find it impossible to join in both with the direction and thrust of the Coalition’s approach to tuition fees.
As well as the NUS pledge which I signed at the last general election, personally I find it impossible to reconcile what would be a change of stance on my own part and a departure from the approach which I set out as UK party leader in the previous elections of 2001 and 2005.
Accordingly, I shall be voting against the Coalition’s proposals on university tuition fees.
The full letter is here
(via LibdemVoice).
Labour and the unions: the Blairites are back
Second only to the Granita pact in the list of most memorable New Labour meals is surely Stephen Byers’ fish supper of 1996. Labour’s frontbench spokesman on industrial relations was in Blackpool for the TUC conference, and speaking to journalists over a restaurant meal, expressed the opinion that the party should cut ties with the unions.
Even for a man who started out as a principled revolutionary socialist and ended up touting himself to lobbyists as a ‘cab for hire’ at £5,000 a day, it was hardly a career high.
That the Blairites wanted to go through with the divorce was at that time received wisdom among the political classes. The game plan was to get into office, introduce state funding, keep on tapping the pockets of the super-rich, and then kiss the horny-handed sons of toil goodbye.
continue reading… »
Is Labour’s key problem getting its base to vote?
Here is a rather stark figure from yesterday’s Ipsos-Mori poll that I believes deserves a post of its own.
Polling companies have to weight their results by people ‘certain to vote’, rather than how people generally feel about those parties, for various reasons.
But look how stark the difference is.
Overall, Labour is ten points ahead. It’s only when ‘certain to vote’ is factored in that Labour’s lead is cut to just 3pts.
Doesn’t this suggest Labour’s key problem is many voters sympathetic to the party just cannot bring themselves to vote for it?
According to the data tables, the percentage of people certain not to vote are biased heavily towards Labour: 45% to 37% (Con).
I may be interpreting this wrongly, but that’s what it looks like to me. Thought I’d put it out there anyway.
Update: Anthony Wells at UK Polling Report explains what lies behind the figures.
While I certainly wouldn’t dispute the importance of parties getting their votes out, things are a little different from how they appear, largely because of some of the differences in MORI’s methodology compared to other companies. MORI take account of likelihood to vote in quite a strict way – they ask people how likely they are to vote on a scale of 1-10 and take only those who say they are 10/10 certain to vote. People who say they are 9/10 or 8/10 likely to vote, for example, are excluded. This means MORI’s filtering by likelihood to vote has quite an extreme effect – as you can see from Sunny’s post, this month the filter increased the Conservative level of support by 3 points and reduced the Labour level of support by 4 points.
The whole post is quite interesting on polling methodologies.
What’s the price we pay for smashing windows?
contribution by David Nowell Smith
The fall-out from last week’s has led the Left to revert to type and start bickering. Frustrating as this is, it’s good that the schism has arrived early.
The place of civil disobedience in protests against the cuts will be increasingly important as more and more people take to the streets this winter — not just with an eye to maintaining public sympathy, but also in deciding how we want these demonstrations to be policed.
Fitwatch returns; police action branded ‘illegal’
We reported earlier this week that the Met Police had abruptly decided to force a hosting company to take down the website Fit-Watch, which monitored activities of Forward Intelligence Teams.
Now the police action has been branded as ‘illegal’ by one human rights group, who say the move also violated freedom of speech.
Article 19, which campaign for free speech globally, have issued a statement calling the take-down of fitwatch.org.uk “illegal”.
They also call for the government to include in its upcoming Freedom Bill the requirement that any requests to remove websites by public bodies or private parties be approved by a judge.
The press release stated:
Under human rights law, any restrictions of free expression must be limited in scope. If there was only one illegal page, the law requires that only that page, rather than the entire website with its protected political speech, be removed.
The site has been critical of police surveillance of lawful demonstrations for several years and hosted a wealth of materials and debates about police activities. Even the offending page contained legal advice and is not clearly a violation of any law.
By yesterday the FitWatch website was back up and loudly sticking up two fingers at heavy-handed police action.
A blog-post stated:
This was a real attempt to squash dissent and criticism of the police, as well as attempting to stifle common sense advice to protesters subject to a witch hunt by the right wing press. The solidarity given by so many people has ensured this hasn’t happened, and has shown we can fight back. Even if we were to be arrested and prosecuted now, we would still be grateful to CO11 for the amount of publicity they’ve generated for us.
We’re back, and we’re stronger than ever.
The police action was also covered on BBC London News yesterday (from here, 11m 48s in).
On the Twitter account last night they posted:
We’ve had 10k+ hits to the site today. In the words of one anonymous fitwatcher, ‘fuck you police, we win!’ #fitwatch
Free speech advocates are nevertheless worried that the police may be encouraged to take similar action in the future to shut down more websites.
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